SVG (in LiveCode) can do that?!

Alejandro Tejada capellan2000 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 16 14:46:16 EST 2017


Given  that you posted in the mail list, instead of sending a private
message, you would not mind read our opinions too:

SVG is not about graphics, scalable or vectors.

SVG is a document format that includes text, images and vector
graphics driven by javascript, a programming language.

In theory, you could make a whole website using only SVG, without any html.

In theory, you could even replace most PDF documents using only SVG
files (including hyperlinks and read-only fonts)

In theory, it should be possible to replicate a Livecode stack
functionality, using only SVG and javascript.

In practice, you need to be a programmer (an outstanding programmer)
to acomplish any of this at some length.

If the title of that video have not read "SVG can do that?", I have
thought that this was a Shockwave Flash presentation from 10 years
ago... Maybe even 15 years ago!

Colin Holgate or Scott Rossi could tell which flash versions could do
all this inside a browser using the flash plugin.

Why Adobe does not simply created a text only flash format version
(compressed as gzip if needed) and fixed their plugin performance
issues and bugs? The collective internet wisdom have posted their own
theories: Adobe simply does not have anymore the knowledge (or wisdom)
to make this happen. The persons who could have made this happen, have
retired, or leave... or were just fired.

While watching the youtube video, I laugh a lot after reading this
quote in a message written by Jason Grigsby:

"You can't be a web performance expert without being an image expert."

I could add:
"... and in the web, you can't be an image expert without being a programmer."

And that is the problem of SVG. You could not use SVG at full capacity
without being a knowledgeable programmer in html and javascript.

If the very first Design computer programs have had this requisite,
you could be sure that Design and Computer Graphics in general would
not be as advanced as today.

Could you imagine that using the very first version of Ilustrator or
Photoshop would have required to learn Postscript or C or Pascal or
any other computer language?

My first (and costly - US$ 100 dollars in 1992) Programming book was
about postscript language and could not even learn anything from it,
because when I reached home, unpacked and read the book, only then I
discover that the book required a diskette that was not included in
that edition...

It's the same disappoint that Designers discover while using SVG.
Want to use SVG at some capacity? Learn Javascript and html... first.
That is a step backward... not forward.

Al




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